Keynote Panel
David Theo Goldberg
David Theo Goldberg directs the systemwide University of California Humanities Research Institute (www.uchri.org). He is also Professor of Comparative Literature and Criminology, Law and Society, as well as a Fellow of the Critical Theory Institute, at the University of California, Irvine. He has authored several books, including The Racial State (Basil Blackwell, 2002) and Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (Basil Blackwell, 1993). He has also edited or co-edited many books, including Anatomy of Racism (University of Minnesota Press 1990), Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader (Basil Blackwell 1995), Between Law and Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 2001), Relocating Postcolonialism (Basil Blackwell, 2002), and The Companion to Gender Studies (Basil Blackwell, 2004). His current monograph, The Threat of Race, will be published by Basil Blackwell in 2007.
Goldberg is the co-founder and co-leader of HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory). HASTAC (www.hastac.org) is a global consortium of eighty institutions committed to the development, application, and analysis of digital technologies in, for, and by the humanities, arts, and social scientists in collaboration with technologists, engineers, and computational scientists. He has turned his attention increasingly to promoting the creative and dynamic use of digital technologies to advance research, teaching and learning in the humanities, arts, and social sciences. With Cathy Davidson of Duke University, he is running the annual national HASTAC-Macarthur Competitiuon in Digital Media and Learning, awarding $2-3 million in grants each year.
Tara McPherson
Professor McPherson teaches courses in new media, television, and popular culture in USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. Before arriving at USC, Tara taught literature, film, and popular culture at MIT. Her Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (Duke UP: 2003) received the 2004 John G. Cawelti Award for the outstanding book published on American Culture and was a finalist for the Katherine Singer Kovacs Book Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. She is co-editor of the anthology Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture (Duke UP: 2003) and editor of Digital Youth, Innovation and the Unexpected, part of the MacArthur Foundation series on Digital Media and Learning (MIT Press, 2008.) Her writing has appeared in numerous journals, including Camera Obscura, The Velvet Light Trap, Discourse, and Screen, and in edited anthologies such as Race and Cyberspace, The New Media Handbook, The Visual Culture Reader 2.0, Virtual Publics and Basketball Jones. She is currently co-editing an anthology on digital narrative and politics and working on a book manuscript on the racial epistemologies of new media. Her new media research focuses on issues of convergence, gender, race, and representation, as well as upon the development of new tools and paradigms for digital publishing, learning, and authorship.
She is the Founding Editor of Vectors, www.vectorsjournal.org, the multimedia peer-reviewed journal sponsored by USC’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy. Vectors pushes far beyond the ‘text with pictures’ format of much online scholarly publishing, encouraging work that takes full advantage of the multimodal and networked capacities of computing technologies. She was recently selected as one of three editors for the new MacArthur-supported International Journal of Learning and Media (forthcoming from MIT Press in 2009), a hybrid online/print journal that will also explore new forms of online publishing.
Co-organizer of the 1999 conference, Interactive Frictions, Tara was among the founding organizers of Race in Digital Space, a multi-year project that included conferences and art exhibits in both April 2001 and October 2002 and that was supported by the Annenberg Center for Communication and the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations. She currently works with local charter schools in Los Angeles on an initiative that examines the potential for emergent multimedia and gaming technologies to revitalize public education. She is a member of the Academic Advisory Board of The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Archives, has frequently served as an AFI juror, is a core board member of HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory), and is on the boards of several journals. With support from the Mellon Foundation, she is currently working with colleagues from Brown, NYU, Rochester, and UC San Diego to explore the feasibility of a digital hub for visual culture research.
Websites
- Vectors: www.vectorsjournal.org
- HASTAC: www.hastac.org
- Race in Digital Space 2.0 Conference: http://www.annenberg.edu/race/
- Interactive Frictions Conference: http://www.annenberg.edu/labyrinth/interactive.html
- Juan Devis’ OpenPlay: http://iml.usc.edu/laproject/index.html